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A collaboration with A Blade of Grass (ABOG), a non-profit organization that provides resources to artists who serve as innovative conduits for social change, this program will feature a performance by Maria Hupfield, FIELDWORKS film screenings featuring four ABOG fellows, and a panel discussion with Stephanie Dinkins, Mary Mattingly, and Maria Hupfield, moderated by artist and racial equity trainer Nayantara Sen of Art/Work Practice.

Decolonizing the Land, Decolonizing the Mind will imagine a more inclusive future in which indigenous and POC communities are thriving and creating alternative systems and technologies to protect people and the environment, disrupting longstanding biases and imperialist aggression. The program is presented in conjunction with Mary Mattingly: What Happens After.

This public program will include a short performance by artist Maria Hupfield (Wasauksing First Nation), whose multi-media art reflects her resistance to Western essentializing of Native artists as interchangeable producers of exotic cultural experiences. The performance will be followed by film screenings documenting projects by ABOG Fellows Black Quantum Futurism, Stephanie Dinkins, Rick Lowe, and Rulan Tangen. The films demonstrate artistic practices that center Indigenous artistic and ecological knowledge through collaborative dance; combat xenophobia against refugees; fight gentrification through Afrofuturist philosophies; and expose how racism is built into emergent artificial intelligence technology. FIELDWORKS is produced by RAVA Films.

The act of collaboratively changing the form of an object with a violent and complex history, can be a powerful one. Can it become ritual? Healing? Through the transformation of a massive military vehicle used in the Gulf and Afghan wars, nine performance artists created instead a bridge for communication and a stage for re-visioning a future for public spaces in an increasingly militarized world.

Image: Earth mandala by cultural artist Venaya Yazzie as part of the culminating performance of SEEDS : REGENERATION, a collaborative project by ABOG Fellow Rulan Tangen’s indigenous dance company Dancing Earth and native community members of the southwest Four Corners region, in Ute and Diné territory as hosted by Fort Lewis Community Concert Hall, Durango